1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to digital terrestrial television broadcasting, and more particularly to a frequency synchronization technique for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Digital Video Broadcasting—Terrestrial (DVB-T) is the European standard for digital video services and the physical layer is based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). With the deployment of DVB-T systems, communication channel impairment, arising from adjacent television channels, multipath, and co-channel interference, for example, may appear. OFDM is well known as a highly spectral efficient transmission scheme capable of dealing with severe channel impairment encountered in a wireless environment. The basic idea of OFDM is to divide the available spectrum into several sub-channels (sub-carriers). By making all sub-channels narrowband, they experience almost flat fading, which makes equalization very simple. To obtain a high spectral efficiency the frequency response of the sub-channels are overlapping and orthogonal. This orthogonality can be completely maintained, even though the signal passes through a time-dispersive channel, by introducing a cyclic prefix. A cyclic prefix is a copy of the last part of the OFDM symbol which is pre-appended to the transmitted symbol. This makes the transmitted signal periodic, which plays a decisive role in avoiding inter-symbol and inter-carrier interference.
OFDM can largely eliminate the effects of inter-symbol interference for high-speed transmission in highly dispersive channels with a relatively low implementation cost by separating a single high speed bit stream into a multiplicity of much lower speed bit streams each modulating a different sub-carrier. However, OFDM is known to be vulnerable to synchronization errors, in particular, to frequency errors, due to the narrow spacing between sub-carriers. Frequency offsets are created by differences in oscillators in transmitter and receiver, Doppler shifts, or phase noise introduced by non-linear channels. There are two destructive effects caused by a carrier frequency offset in OFDM systems. One is the reduction of signal amplitude and the other is the introduction of inter-carrier interference from the other carriers. The latter is caused by the loss of orthogonality between the sub-channels. It is found that a multicarrier system is much more sensitive than a single-carrier system. Thus, estimation and removal of the frequency offset from the received signal is most critical in OFDM receivers. In view of the above, what is needed is a robust frequency synchronization scheme suitable for OFDM systems.